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>paying about $500-600 for a 14 day course. I only co-mentor for 2 days - the days we teach fundamentals of software development and then show how to code with Replit, Bolt, Lovable, Emergent, etc.

Wow.

Do these tools require training to use? Are they not really designed such that a 5 year old can use it? "build me a thing that does Y" style.

The course is broader and it is for people who are not from a technical background at all. Think about a course to introduce the idea of working with LLMs for day to day work. What are agents, then focusing on coding agents, and so on.

> Manus is running $5000 credit for 2000 people.

How would this work though? They give out free "credits" and then claim usage of those as ARR? That would be outright fraudulent, no?

Who is paying for those "Manus Credits"?

What’s “fraudulent” about lying in a marketing blog post? Private companies can, in most situations, say whatever they want about their business. They are almost certainly lying (as are most of these companies) by categorising any revenue as “recurring” but it wouldn’t be fraudulent to do that. Their investors are surely aware of the real financials and have no problem with this public posturing because it serves only to increase the value of their investment.

ARR drives startup valuations. For example people might argue if you have $100M ARR the startup is worth 10x, so $1B.

Now that’s a pretty good incentive to drive up ARR, no matter how.

Welcome to the world of creative accounting!

One-time projects? Count as ARR! 3 months contract with no extension? Count as ARR! You gave a discount of 50% for the first year? Make sure to count the full price as ARR!

And now Perplexity has mailed all of those "free" users to add a "card" (wont charge now) to continue with its free pro offer. Apart from airtel perplexity ran a lot of college based programs where students were basically referring each other for money.

They also have 12 months free when subscribing through Paypal. There's almost zero chance I remain a customer after those 12 months are over, since I find ChatGPT way more valuable.

They dont need to stay. They just need you as a user long enough to sell off to some dumb investor or another company that will find dumb investors.